As expected, the premiere of Looking, the new HBO series about three gay men in San Francisco, kicked the ol’ Internet think-piece machine into high gear. As it should have! The show, though a relatively low-key affair on the surface, stokes a lot of big questions about gay representation on television—what is the right way to depict the gay experience these days? Is there even a right way, and thus a wrong way? It’s undoubtedly a sign of progress that we’re not having the same frustrating conversation we used to have about sidelined queer characters, often stereotyped or desexualized to within an inch of their fictional lives. But as the conversation has evolved and gotten more nuanced, it’s suddenly started to feel somehow more limiting. The further we get from the collective frustration of the past, the narrower our sense of correctness has become.

The most egregious recent example of this problem is a Slate essay written by J. Bryan Lowder called “Why Is Looking So Boring?” In the piece, Lowder asks, "How can a gay man watch a gay show this boring in 2014 and call it, with a straight face, ‘shocking’?”

He goes on to argue that Looking isn’t just lacking genuine insight, but also that it spends its time offering up already well-chewed-over facets of the gay experience and presents them to us as something new, novel, and therefore groundbreaking. “All these issues have been openly discussed within the community for decades now,” he writes, “with a level of nuance and intelligence that, frankly, seems hopelessly beyond the kind of grown gay men who, as we see in upcoming episodes, have nervous breakdowns about foreskin or titter like teenagers at an institution as venerable as the Folsom Street Fair.” Fair enough: the issues in question—interracial relationships, couples inviting third parties into their beds, the dreaded creep toward sexual and social obsolescence—are indeed ones that have been talked about extensively, in real life and onscreen, in subtler and more intricate ways than they are on Looking.

But isn’t it a tad presumptuous to assume that everyone within the gay community, as vague and amorphous an idea as that is, has discussed these topics to the point that they’ve become moot? Lowder assumes that gay men who find Looking novel must have “assiduously avoided becoming familiar with other (perhaps older) gay people and gay thought in general.” Forget the possibility that some people might not have access to other gay people or “gay thought in general,” whatever that means, or, heck, those who might just think differently than J. Bryan Lowder. If you liked Looking, his argument goes, you’ve done something wrong.

Lowder bemoans what he sees as the show’s post-gay vibe, a sense that Looking is trying to stress an overly safe normalcy, even heteronormativity, above all else. He writes, “But even if a gay person honestly holds such a limited view of themselves and their community (and many do), the question remains: What can be the appeal in watching a show that amounts to a lightly dramatized version of a press release originally meant for straights?”

Far be it from me to question what holds appeal for Lowder, but given the spirit of his piece, it’s more than a bit rich of him to write something as bald-facedly dismissive as the phrase “even if a gay person honestly holds such a limited view of themselves.” Limited how? Lowder seems to be suggesting that any gay man who recognizes himself in the show is somehow deficient. In an essay that later complains about “gradual erasure as we all slide toward some bland cultural mean,” that’s a pretty erasing statement to make.

Erasing of whom? Well, me, for one. You couldn’t pay me a million dollars (well, O.K., you couldn’t pay me a hundred dollars) to go to the Folsom Street Fair. And even if you could, you’d better believe I would titter like an eight-year-old, forget like a teenager, the whole time I was there. Not because there’s anything wicked or dirty about it, but because in addition to being a grand statement of pride, it's also kind of a silly thing, isn’t it? And it’s a milieu in which plenty of gay people, or straight people, or any kind of people, don’t spend much of their lives. So titter on, Patrick and friends. I’m tittering right along with you. That doesn’t make them, or me, somehow less fully realized gay people, it just means we’re different, in all kinds of non-affronting ways—socially, sexually, maybe even politically. What Lowder sees as movement toward a “bland cultural mean,” may actually just be a depiction of people who exist within the community in a different way than he does. To him they have a limited view of themselves, are wrong in not detecting what he sees as a "laughable basicness." But really, who’s doing the limiting here?

Which isn’t to put skittishness or prudishness up on a pedestal. Lowder cites another Looking essay, by Gawker’s Rich Juzwiak, as one he agrees with, and in that piece Juzwiak makes some fair points about how Looking shies away from showing sex as frankly as its Sunday night companion, Girls, does. (Juzwiak also brings up Game of Thrones, which is so stylistically and aesthetically far from Looking that it’s like comparing Beverly Cleary to E. L. James.) Sure we should see more sex, in all its various forms, on Looking, because sex is as fundamental a part of life as any of the clothes-on worrying and wandering seen on the show. But if the show’s characters display inhibitions that don’t jive with queerness as Lowder sees fit, then he should take it up with the characters, not with the show’s supposed responsibility to his own deceptively rigid notions of queerness.

The more we’ve ached and clamored for representation, the more impossible expectations we’ve put on any instance of it, to the point that when we arrive at a show like Looking, a hazy and kinda soapy glimpse of three guys bumbling around the Bay Area, people like Lowder immediately begin the tried-and-true practice of tearing it down for not being representative enough, or not correctly representative in some crucial way. There is definitely a conversation to be had about gay media's approach, or lack of approach, to issues of age, race, and socioeconomic status, among other things. But that’s not the conversation that Lowder and his ilk want to have. Instead they go after a thing’s fundamental conception of gayness, fashioning themselves as champions of an eternally misrepresented community.

Lowder begins his piece by imagining how “you” would react to Looking if it were on the gay dating app Grindr. It’s a cute setup, I guess, but it also immediately assumes familiarity. As silly a detail as that might be, right from the get-go there’s an assumption of universality—we all hook up on Grindr, don’t we fellas?—in a piece that then goes on to criticize a show for not being attentive enough to various idiosyncrasies of queer life. Looking is deemed boring because Lowder, a man in his mid-20s who lives in New York City, sees nothing personally novel or shocking about it. Grindr is old hat, cruising might even be passé, intra-gay social dynamics as seen on the show are just so basic compared with how he and his friends relate to one another. So isn’t it all so terribly dull and toothless. It’s Lowder’s prerogative to find anything he wants shocking or not. But in so adamantly diagnosing the show as totally and terminally bland, on the basis of something as indefinable as "queerness," he’s dismissing a lot of gay people who may find it anything but.

To me, a non-Grindr-using, non-cruising 30-year-old who lives in New York City and has plenty of cruise-happy, Grindr-addicted, Black Party-attending friends, Looking is mildly transfixing escapism. It’s sexy and intriguing and provides a sometimes disheartening look at some imagined lives that are very different from my own. Lowder may personally find nothing surprising about the show, may think its occasional bouts of sexual and social timidity represent unrealistically immature, or even straight, behavior for the modern enlightened gay man. But to some of us—well, at least me! And I count!—the show doesn’t feel bound up by heteronormative mores, or plagued by particularly shallow views of gay culture. Patrick and his friends actually seem plenty queer from my perspective. So if they are “boring,” empty and inexact depictions of what it means to be queer in America, then what the hell does that make me?

Keeping a sharp eye on inclusivity and the dreaded D-word diversity is something well worth doing—culture needs policing, moderating, curating, shepherding, whatever you want to call it. But in the specific instance of a show like Looking, I wonder what good, if any, comes out of calling bullshit on its very gayness, even calling it “minstrelsy,” as Lowder does. It’s a blithely clumsy attempt at eschewing the supposedly milquetoast in favor of broad-minded inclusivity that instead makes the huddle appear tighter and more exclusive, the variety of lives and experiences within the big nebulous gay community suddenly atomized and irreconcilable.

According to Lowder, “There was a time when this obvious truth [meaning, that gays are people capable of leading boring and prosaic lives, just like everyone else] may have needed stating—indeed, when speaking it might have been seen as a striking political act. But surely that time was at least 20 years ago.” Surely that time was at least 20 years ago for whom, exactly? Somewhere around 1994 the need to insist upon a common humanity just . . . stopped? What Lowder is really arguing here is that Looking doesn't do it for him, doesn’t startle or appeal to his particular millennial sensibilities enough, and thus he’s branded it “boring,” a big and condemning and ultimately dismissive word that in some ways reads as “useless.”

Again, he’s free to find the show dull, as I’m sure many others do, and I wish for them, and for the rest of us, another show that hits all the spots they want hit. (This doesn't have to be the only gay show, you know.) But for Lowder to assert that Looking has so little cultural value, and may even be a bad thing (as the post's URL suggests), simply because it shows him nothing new, because it speaks in a language that seems somehow timid or anachronistic in the narrow reflection of his own experiences, is an act of minimizing that’s way worse than anything Looking is doing. Lowder is effectively alienating whole swaths of people in a blind, arrogant, and inevitably fruitless pursuit of an impossible gay purity. Purity as it looks to him, anyway.